Grace for Your Season

In the last part of the Growing in Grace series, we will look at grace for your current season.

I do not make children who sleep. In fact, they thwart my attempts at good mothering at every opportunity. Want me to sleep? Not today mom! Oh, you wanted me to eat food? I’ll just throw that on the floor you just cleaned. Can I get a witness?

Cleaning up endless messes, getting spit up on, helping my pre-teen navigate friendships and crushes…this is the season I am in. In a blink of an eye I will be in the season of teenage years. The biggest thing I have learned as a mom is that the days are long, but the years are short. I know that seasons change.

My husband and I were married one week from the day I graduated college. We entered that sweet first season, the honeymoon period. The first two years were spent just the two of us. Changing jobs, moving, adding three kids, vacations, hard times, and lots of day-to-day life... it is easy to forget where we came from. It's easy to take what we have for granted. We certainly have had our great times in these last 13 years, but it has also come with hard seasons. Thankfully, even in our marriage, seasons change.

When I had my first child I had to work full-time as a teacher. It was heart breaking to send him to daycare at just five weeks old. I spent the next five years teaching in public school, and my son went to daycare. There were periods of time I wanted nothing more than being home with him. As I sit here typing this, I am with my three kids at home, and we have just wrapped up our first year of homeschooling. Seasons change. 

Does it seem like there are more seasons of challenge and change in your life? I don’t know if the old saying, “Time flies when you are having fun,” applies to those easy and fun seasons, or if they are just fewer and farther between. But I wouldn’t trade those challenging seasons because the hard seasons bear much fruit. I grow. But growing pains are real. 

Maybe you are in a season of waiting, of dreaming, of planning. Maybe you are in a season of change or of being still. Whatever season you find yourself in right now, I want to encourage you to find grace- grace for yourself, grace for others, and just grace to be where you are. Honor your growing pains, live in the moment, and also allow yourself to dream about future seasons. As the song goes, “It’s not too late.”